In this fifth installment of our series on conversational usability, our focus shifts to conversational usability and the process of evaluating and improving conversational interfaces that often differ significantly from the visual and physical interfaces we normally use to test with end users.

Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of sharing insights and tutorials on decoupled Drupal, which was originally unknown territory with shifting sands but today is a widely adopted approach, including by some of Acquia's most influential customers. Nonetheless, the relative unavailability of developer-focused resources that are both authoritative and current has hindered architects' and developers' ability to evaluate and explore decoupled Drupal for themselves.

Though there was no DrupalCon Europe this year, the European Drupal community stepped up and organized their own conference, Drupal Europe, in Darmstadt, Germany last month. An incredibly successful gathering held in the Darmstadtium venue, a beautiful convention center in the center of this college town, Drupal Europe demonstrated the unique power that grassroots initiatives can have in our open-source community.

When Drupal 8.0 was released two and a half years ago, with a built-in REST API, it signaled the start of Drupal's evolution to an API-first platform. Since then, each of the five new releases of Drupal 8 introduced significant web service API improvements. Drupal 8.6, shipping in September, will also have a new bunch of API improvements.

With a uniquely diverse community of designers, developers, and everyone in between, Frontend United is one of the conferences I find I enjoy more and more each time I attend. And this time, in Utrecht, a wide range of designer- and developer-oriented content greeted attendees both within and well outside the Drupal universe.

Revered management thinker Peter Drucker once wrote, “If you can’t replicate something because you don’t understand it, then it really hasn’t been invented; it’s only been done.” In many ways content modeling in Drupal has been done without being invented. For this reason, we’re developing a discipline for content modeling at Acquia. It’s drastically reducing both costs and defect rates for us.

As we saw in the previous post, core REST only allows for individual entities to be retrieved, and Views REST exports only permit the issuance of GET requests rather than unsafe methods as well. But application developers often need greater flexibility and control, such as the ability to fetch collections, sort and paginate them, and access related entities that are referenced.

In this column, we'll inspect JSON API, part of the surrounding contributed web services ecosystem that Drupal 8 relies on to provide even more extensive features relevant to application developers that include relationships and complex operations such as sorting and pagination.

When Phillies hats begin to dot the landscape and one of the most beautiful train stations in the country materializes around you, you know you're in Philadelphia, a city I can never seem to stop loving. After a brief hiatus, Drupaldelphia was in full swing this year, attracting developers, creatives, and businesspeople from all over Pennsylvania and surrounding states to a conference that is always full of pleasant surprises.